Monday, 11 March 2013

The Group Project; Week One

Week one is always a challenge, the
group had a few weeks to begin working before having to give a
presentation on our initial ideas in front of the other students and
the tutors and for myself week one included gathering as much
reference, mainly from the internet and books, and then to get pencil
to paper as quickly as possible.

The search for reference material was
as much looking into historical documentation from the age as well as
visual reference. As I found it is extremely difficult to find any
accurate visual reference from the 17th century other than
in paintings and old maps. I had to consider the fact that the
project is titled 'Off the Map' so I tried to gather as much
reference material from the maps I could find as possible. Although
the maps gave me great ideas on the actual layouts of the streets, it
was hard to gather an idea on what the streets of 17th
Century London would actually look like from the ground. Some of the
maps I came across did have hand drawn or engraved cityscapes of
London on them such as James de la Feuille's map of London
c. 1690 and the engraved panorama of London by Visccher 1616.I
also gathered as much imagery I could of old 'tudor' style buildings
to help aid with the concepting.

In
our first weeks meeting we were all full of ideas from the reference
collected by each of us. It was great to be able to share each others
ideas and talk about the individual pieces of information we had
gathered and we began to accumulate all of this giving us a glimpse
of the direction in which we thought we might want to take this
project. We then discussed where we would take our initial ideas and
continue to develop them further into the next week.

Below is one of the first maps I added to my reference, James de la Feuille's map of London c. 1690.

Below is a selection of reference images collected in week one.

Below is some of my initial sketches developed from week one's reference, some I kept quite serious but I also experimented with the 'wonkiness' of the buildings.